You Have the Right to Remain Silent

Here at HQ we’ve gone all prepper, stocking up on microwave popcorn and non-dairy capuccino mix in order to keep our edge at showtime. The atmosphere is jittery but contained, tempered by weariness and sharpened by wait. Weather conditions are forecast, bathroom breaks programmed and dogs walked under cover of darkness. We expect nothing and carefully prepare for it.

Silence is our greatest ally now. Beyond the growing wall of background noise, there isn’t much left to say at the end of this era, except maybe “pass the popcorn”. First rule of the show is: talking about the show makes you part of the show. Now is time to sit back and ponder on why creator gave us twice the number of ears than mouths.

Words, like currency, are rendered worthless by excess and abuse. Just as the gadzillion reserve notes the Fed churns out devalue all existing reserve notes, the language of twisted words cheapen and debase the essence of all words. We have been extraordinarily lax in our stewardship of the verbal capacity. We allow our most beautiful words to be forced into whoredom and pay to defile them even as they enslave us. We allow weaponized words to destroy basic human decency and kill our very being. And still we remain in blissful ignorance of our true plight on this planet of sound, bewitched and beguiled by an illusory construct of verbal abstractions.

HQ dialogue has been stripped down to basic meme units: non-dairy cream substitute, genuine butter flavoring, this side up. Boiling water, five seconds between pops. Simple and functional words that don’t cling or linger. Silence is the only refuge now. Silence doesn’t care if it’s the butter or the flavor that’s genuine.

At HQ we exercise our right to remain silent, shedding our dry, brittle words and facing Universe in naked silence. The doors are open to welcome the emptiness that contains it all: the haunting cry of slaughterhouse Earth, a final pop and all nothing breaking loose.